Gender differences in chess – feedback and a new theory

1/30/2012 – We recently told
you about a report on the gender differences in chess – why it is
that there is just one woman in the top 100 players in the world, and just 2.2
percent in the top 1000, according to the FIDE rating list. Naturally we received
a large number of more or less adamant opinions from our readers, which we now
share with you, together with a pet idea of our own.

Before we proceed to the feedback from our readers, and our new
attempt at an explanation of why there are so few women in the top levels
of chess, here is a new service provided by Peter Zhdanov,
the husband of Natalia Pogonina. Peter informed us that her
web site has been calculating live ratings of top female players since July
2010. In addition there is a list of the highest
rated women of all time, which we gladly share with our readers:

Feedback from our readers

David Levens, Nottingham, England
I see nothing wrong or unusual in having differences in male and female brains,
though to claim one is better than the other is ridiculous. Different yes, better
no! But the reason males generally do better in competitive events is a chemical
called testosterone. It makes males more competitive. Broadly speaking the more
successful females in competitive have a higher level of testosterone than their
counterparts. Though I work full time as professional chess coach, I am a qualified
athletics coach too.

Mavaddat Javid, Vancouver
Thank you for your astute and science-based article on the explanation for the
gender-imbalance in chess. It is the first evidential report on this subject
that I have ever seen from the chess community on this subject and I was very
glad to see it. It made me feel happy to be a supporter and follower of ChessBase.
I sincerely hope every ChessBase reader interested in this subject can peruse
the literature you cite so that we can better understand why biology alone simply
cannot account for any significant part of this difference. Great work!

Ken Unbe, Denver, CO, USA
A 19-year old woman visited Denver, Colorado, USA and beat the state champion
19-1 (that man is NOT an offender in the following). Another male player spoke
to her in front of other male players about specific sexual behavior of two
other female players whom he named. There was another local young female who
enjoyed participating and improving her game who was also subjected to such
harassment. There was another case of a male discussing in public the sexuality
of a female player who was at the time a legal minor.

Neil Charness, Tallahassee, Florida
Relevant to your readers, I suspect, are the following studies on gender and
chess skill:

See also Proceedings of the Royal Society: Why
are (the best) women so good at chess? andHow
Intellectual is Chess ("In 1927 Djakow et al. first showed that
world-class chess players do not have exceptional intellectual abilities.
This finding has subsequently been confirmed many times. Different participation
rates, or differences in the amount of practice, motivation and interest
for chess in male and female chess players, may provide a better explanation
for gender differences in chess performance.") – Ed

Clive Waters, Blyth
For any statistic to be relevant, you would need to take the total number of
female players as a fraction of the total number of male players. Get a prediction
of expected results for females and only then compare with the number per selective
group. Your 2.2% is meaningless with regard to gender difference.

Really? And if we discover that exactly 2.2% of all chess players are
female, what would we have found out? Would one not have to conduct a new
investigation to explain why only 2.2% are women? – Ed.

Ed Seedhouse, Victoria, Canada
The most obvious explanation, surely, is simply that far fewer women play serious
chess. Assuming, say, that only 2% of serious tournament players are women,
then in any area of the distribution we would expect to find only 2% women even
if there is no inter gender difference in ability. So first you must correct
for the population sizes. A simple one way analysis of variance procedure can
tell you if there is any statistically significant difference between the two
populations. I would exclude women who only play in women's events because they
form different rating pools and cannot be fairly compared. So take all the men
who play serious tournament chess and all the women. Calculate the means and
variances do a simple math procedure and find what "F" is and what
the resulting "p" is. If p is statistically significant only then
is there something to wonder about.

Paul Albert, South Salem, NY, USA
I read the articles with interest, both summary and full articles with comments.
I am a strong advocate of equal opportunity for both men and women, but reject
any thesis that therefore the result should be about 50/50 representation of
men and women in every level of position and achievement. Why? Women are different
than men: (I speak both from the experience of being married 43 years, having
a twin sister, studying in school with women, and working with women in the
business world including where they were my boss and vice versa). Being different
does not mean less intelligent or less capable; to the contrary, many women
are more intelligent and more capable than men. There may be cultural differences
that include lack of free choice imposed on women, but some of these so called
cultural differences are a result of the women's own natural selectivity of
preferences and interests. So in chess, if we eliminated all artificial impediments,
would 5 out of the top 10 or 50 of the top 100 just naturally be women? Frankly,
I doubt it, but I can't tell you exactly why. The good thing is that we have
Judit Polgar and other strong women chess players who are stronger than thousands
of male players. Let them flourish and inspire other both female and male players.
After all cultural and prejudicial barriers are dropped, I don't think it matters
whether women are 1%, 10%, 50%, or even more of the top. But in chess or other
fields as well, I do not anticipate that it will be or should be evenly distributed.
Women will prevail in some areas, men in others, but it doesn't matter as long
as everyone is free to pursue his/her own interests. That's what is meant by
liberty and freedom; equal result is not its proper measure.

Paul Beach, Auckland, New Zealand
Why don't we just ask the top women players why they think there is a difference?
Surely they would know more about it than the men.

Philip Roe, Ann Arbor USA
Something that strikes me is that among the leading women there are three sets
of sisters, the Polgars, the Kointsevas, and the Muzychucks. Maybe not all that
significant out of a very small sample, but I cant think of any sets of famous
brothers. Now sisters will share very similar genetic inheritance and also very
similar upbringings, but if either of these was the explanation, we would expect
an equal proportion of brothers. But also sisters would support each other through
any instances of cultural bias or hostility, so perhaps THAT is an important
advantage to talented sisters, but not so important for talented brothers?

Ben Silva, Tallahassee, USA
It seems that the largest factor accounting for the supposed disparity in playing
strength is simply due to the large disparity in participation of females versus
males in chess tournaments (at least from what I have observed in the states).
Not only is the ratio heavily in favor of male players I believe history tells
us that males also have a head start on the timeline as I am sure you would
find as many women playing chess in the 19th century as you would men knitting.
Society, of course, has quite a bit of influence over gender roles but it seems
impossible that NO biological considerations would exist. For example, it is
a fact that men have more muscle mass, which may act as an advantage in some
activities and a disadvantage in others.

Cristóbal Cervino, Luxembourg

First of all, nice article, but I think the idea that there is a "social
factor" undermining women's performance in math/chess and other technical
subjects doesn't seem quite convincing. In fact I find it quite poor because
there is unfortunately strong evidence that men perform a lot better in the
higher levels of technical domains than women. You could gathers thousands of
data proving just that. But a simple example will make it clear: Why is it that
so few female decide to go into engineering? As far as I know the rate is about
less than 33%. So there is a strong predominance of male students. I imagine
the same happens with physics and maths. Chemistry is perhaps the exception
because I think it doesn't require great level of abstractness which characterizes
the other domains.

You could argue that women are perfectly fit to perform well in these domains
but that they are just not interest and decide to study something else. Is it
really a vocational problem? I don't think so. I believe that one tends to like
what he/she does well. If a female student decides not to study engineering
for example, the probability that the main reason for that is that she doesn't
performs "too well" in math and physics is very high. Usually engineering
students are those who excel at maths and physics already in school. And these
tend to be male. This seems to be the general pattern. In my school with hundreds
of students of different nationalities, about 40 took advanced mathematics.
In the French section with about 20-25 students taking advanced mathematics
only 2-3 were girls; in my section, no girl took advanced mathematics even though
we had a predominance of women in class! There were 16 girls versus five boys.
Four boys took advanced mathematics, and of those 16 girls not one of them did
so!

My general feeling is that women tend to be more focused, and tend to have
higher grades in general already at an early stage in school. This is because
of many reasons, but one good example is that men devote a lot of time to playing
football and other physical activities which are almost non-existent for female's
mentality. Also boys tend to be more addicted to video games.

But the problem is about the extremes. Women outperform us in average, but
at the "elite" not so. This could be for many reasons, but for me,
it is that men have better aptitudes in logical thinking, special reasoning
and abstract thinking. And of course women are better in other domains like
languages, etc. This is nothing new; there are tons of literature about this.
And once, again you can ask yourself why are there so few female Nobel prize
winners in general (in technical domains)? This is a far more complex question.
Some people argue that at the elite level women are clever, but they lack of
a "creative brain" to make advances in science. I do have the feeling
that there could be many, many more female chess players. Unlike winning the
nobel prize I don't think you have to be a genius to be a decent player in chess.
In this case I do think that this lack of interest of women has to do with vocation
and mother biology!

Rouslan Toumaniantz, KortrijkThe "greater male variability" hypothesis is another politically
correct (and quite stupid idea) in support of this completely biaised view based
on the ridiculous axiom of our supposed equal intelligence. When we see that
at tennis maybe four or five women would be able to make it in male top 1000,
everybody agrees that it's simply because males are physically superior to females,
which is normal because we don't carry all the equipment for making babies.
When we see similar results in chess, why don't people admit that it's just
because women are on average intellectually inferior, which is normal because
their brain is inferior to ours in any field apart from its ability to take
care of a young child?

Let's compare man/woman intelligence in random fields. The main outcome of
intelligence being the capacity to invent, create new concepts, innovate in
order to be able to adapt to a changing world, let's check...

Nobel prizes. 97.3% male, 2.7% female.

Fields medal. 100% male.

Inventors. Almost not a single woman in the history of mankind has ever
created anything. Everything you can see in your lives, appartments, houses,
economical concepts, industry development, music styles, architecture, litterature
ideas... everything came out of male brains. Simply said women were washing
clothes and dishes by hand till a man came to give them washmashine and
dishwasher. Even feminism was probably suggested to Beauvoir by Sartre...

Even worse. Almost every woman on earth is a cook. Most men are not. Now
let's have a look at Michelin Guide, and ... woohoo, out of around 50 restaurants
awareded three stars, you'll find two women and... the rest are men. That
is, even in fields that are typically female, elite is still male.

That's just mere facts. Women have 200 grams less brain mass than men. We come
from nomadic tribes where men had to hunt, women stayed with the children and
the elders. That evolution lasted for millions of years or more, and made our
brains what they are. Hunting developed two things in our male brains: the ability
to find our way better (because we needed to find our way back home), and ...
intelligence (because we obviously are not that strong). We needed to become
smarter than, say, a bear or a mammoth, in order to get some meat.

A proposed new explanation

The original study, Debunking
Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance, by Jonathan Kane and Janet
Mertz, tested several popular explanations for the percieved gender gap in mathematics.
Their cross-cultural analysis seems to rule out several causal candidates, including
coeducational schools, low standards of living, and innate variability among
boys. Much of what was discovered (and refuted) applies directly to chess, which
is why the study was so interesting for us.

However, the Kane and Mertz did not propose any really compelling reasons why
women should not be as capable and, more importantly, as successful, as men
in the field of mathematics – or by analogy in chess. Why is there just
one woman in the top 100 players on the FIDE rating list, and why are just 2.2
percent of the top 1000 players female? Others have put forth many possible
explanations, but none of them are really convincing. We would like to add one
to the list, an explanation which to our knowledge has not been proposed before.
It is presented as a possible factor, which may perhaps turn out to to be a
major one.

What is the best age for rising talents to immerse themselves so deeply into
chess that the structures required to achieve true excellence are hardwired
into the brain? Obviously this can only happen in their teen years. Just as
in language, if you have not learnt all the grammatical and idiomatic intricacies,
all the patterns and all the relations between them, by the time you are twenty,
you may still become a competent speaker (or chessplayer) but will never progress
to the very highest levels.

Now there is a big difference between the environment for boys and girls during
their teen years. Girls become interesting to older boys, who look out for them
and offer interesting activities outside of chess. A sixteen-year-old female
chess talent will usually have boys with driving licences and cars asking them
out to meals and movies – or other exciting things. The point is that
a sixteen-year-old male talent is very rarely picked up by nineteen-year-old
girls with fun and distraction on their minds. They stick with chess, by necessity,
while their female colleagues are experimenting with other games and entertainment.

So: as a male the probability is much higher that you will have dedicated yourself
to acquiring the basic skills and mental structures required to achieve true
excellence in chess, because at the only time that this was possible you really
had nothing else to do – or nothing to seriously distract you.

This theory has not been empirically or statistically tested in the way Kane
and Mertz did in their study. We base it only on observation of dozens or so
very young female talents that we encountered (and tried to foster). Many were
indistinguishable from young male talents, but all of them ended a few hundred
points from the very top. Many were deeply determined and seemed on the way
to reaching the highest rankings, but inevitably they stopped at the GM level
and did not proceed to the very top (with of course the one big exception).

We did conduct one test – inadvertently. During a recent tournament I
expounded the theory during a minibus ride and got the following reactions from
two very attractive members of the press staff, girls in their early twenties:
"You are telling this to two WGMs who started off well and never made it
to the top?!" – "Oh, sorry," I replied, "I did not
think of that. Is it completely implausible?" – "No," one
of them replied, "I think you hit the nail right on the head!"

See also

1/26/2012 – "Let us help you to build your federation and your chess in schools programme," says the press release. "Our objective is to be able to generate more income than you pay to FIDE – much more." This reversal of flow of funds is admittedly something new for FIDE. The income is expected to be generated by Premium Membership and the goal is one billion chess players on the planet.Discuss

1/9/2012 – A new and very commendable women's live rating list of top players is being
maintained by the Russian chess news portal ChessPro.
Fired by this list we did a little additional research to find out how many
female players there are in the top 100 and top 1000. What would you estimate?
And what are the possible reasons
for the superiority of males in certain intellectual activities? Latest research.Discuss

Discuss

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